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On Friday, we published a post entitled, “Think for a moment…” which posed the question of whether we might be better-served looking back at our most important existing features and streamlining them rather than inventing new features to solve that have little impact.

Over the weekend, a promotional email landed in my inbox from Nightingale Conant. It is completely unrelated to OSS, yet the steps outlined below seem to be a fairly good guide for identifying what to reinvent within our existing OSS.

“Go out and talk to as many people [customers or potential] as you can, and ask them the following questions:
1. Do you have a nagging problem you cannot solve?
2. What is that problem?
3. Why is solving that problem important to you?
4. How would solving that problem change the quality of your life?
5. How much would you be willing to pay to solve that problem?

Note: Before you ask these questions, make sure you let the people know that you’re not going to sell them anything. This way you’ll get quality answers.
After you’ve talked with numerous people, you’ll begin to see a pattern. Look for the common problems that you believe you could solve. You’ll also know how much people are willing to pay to have their problem solved and why.”

I’d be curious to hear back from you. Do those first 4 questions identify a pattern that relates to features you’ve never heard of before or features that your OSS already performs (albeit perhaps not as optimally as it could)?

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“Many of the most important new companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb and more are winning not by giving good-enough solutions…, but rather by delivering a superior experience….”
Ben Thompson, stratechery.com

Think for a moment about the millions of developer hours that have gone into creating today’s OSS tools. Think also for a moment about how many of those tools are really clunky to use, install, configure, administer. How many OSS tools have truck-loads of functionality baked in that is just distracting, features that you’re never going to need or use? Conversely, how many are intuitive enough for a high-school student, let’s say, to use for the first time and become effective within a day of self-driven learning?

Let’s say an OSS came along that had all of the most important features (the ones customers really pay for, not the flashy, nice-to-have features) and offered a vastly superior user experience and user interface. Let’s say it took the market by storm.

With software and cloud delivery, it becomes harder to sustain differentiation. Innovative features and services are readily copied. But have a think about how hard it would be for the incumbent OSS to pick apart the complexity of their code, developed across those millions of developer hours, and throw swathes of it away – overhauling in an attempt to match a truly superior OSS experience.

Can you see why I’m bemused that we’re not replacing developers with more UX experts? We can surely create more differentiation through vastly improved experience than we can in creating new functionality (almost all of the most important functionality has already been developed and we’re now investing developer time on the periphery).

As a project for 2019, we’re considering the development of a how-to training course that provides a step-by-step guide to build your own OSS sandpit to play with. It will be built around cloud-native and open-source components. It will be cutting-edge and micro-scaled (but highly scalable in case you want to grow it).

Does this sound like something you’d be interested in hearing more about?

Like or comment if you’d like us to keep you across this project in 2019.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what the sandpit should contain. What would be important to you? We already have a set of key features identified, but will refine it based on community feedback.

The spun out company will “start with $1.2 billion in annual software revenue and an existing global industrial customer base. The company is intended to be a GE wholly-owned, independently run business with a new brand and identity, its own equity structure, and its own Board of Directors. The proposed new organization aims to bring together GE Digital’s industry-leading IIoT solutions including the Predix platform, Asset Performance Management, Historian, Automation (HMI/SCADA), Manufacturing Execution Systems, Operations Performance Management, and the GE Power Digital and Grid Software Solutions businesses.”

Sure, there are fundamental differences between what a sensor network management platform (ooops, should I call that SNMP? That won’t cause any confusion will it??) and what an OSS does. However, there seems to be enough commonality and potential for shared insight to collude.

As far as I’ve ascertained (happy to be told otherwise), GE is the only organisation that has significant offerings in both spaces – Predix in sensor network management and a multitude of OSS / asset tools including Smallworld. Up until now, I understand that Predix and OSS have been kept in separate siloes by GE. Placing the two sets of assets together in the new, as yet unnamed, digital business increases the likelihood of collaboration surely.

If GE really is the only organisation at the Venn-Diagram convergence of IOT and OSS platforms, then it holds a competitive advantage in that niche. The only question that remains is to identify the use-cases and customers that the niche (and its functionality) is relevant to, if any.

PS. Just as an aside, the restructure also includes the announcement that GE is divesting a majority stake in ServiceMax, a product that is often bundled with its OSS offers, which it bought for $916M back in 2016. Silver Lake, a private equity firm will take over that stake in early 2019.

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This is the fourth, and final part (I think) in the series on killing the OSS RFI/RFP process, a process that suppliers and customers alike find to be inefficient. The concept is based on an initiative currently being investigated by TM Forum.

The previous three posts focused on the importance of trusted partnerships and the methods to develop them via OSS procurement events.

Today’s post takes a slightly different tack. It proposes a structural obsolescence that may lead to the death of the RFP. We might not have to kill it. It might die a natural death.

Actually, let me take that back. I’m sure RFPs won’t die out completely as a procurement technique. But I can see a time when RFPs are far less common and significantly different in nature to today’s procurement events.

How??
Technology!
That’s the answer all technologists cite to any form of problem of course. But there’s a growing trend that provides a portent to the future here.

It comes via the XaaS (As a Service) model of software delivery. We’re increasingly building and consuming cloud-native services. OSS of the future, the small-grid model, are likely to consume software as services from multiple suppliers.

And rather than having to go through a procurement event like an RFP to form each supplier contract, the small grid model will simply be a case of consuming one/many services via API contracts. The API contract (eg OpenAPI specification / swagger) will be available for the world to see. You either consume it or you don’t. No lengthy contract negotiation phase to be had.

Now as mentioned above, the RFP won’t die, but evolve. We’ll probably see more RFPs formed between customers and the services companies that will create customised OSS solutions (utilising one/many OSS supplier services). And these RFPs may not be with the massive multinational services companies of today, but increasingly through smaller niche service companies. These micro-RFPs represent the future of OSS work, the gig economy, and will surely be facilitated by smart-RFP / smart-contract models (like the OSS Justice League model).

“Evolution says that biological change is a property of populations — that every individual is a trial run of an experimental combination of traits, and that at the end of the trial, you are done and discarded, and the only thing that matters is what aggregate collection of traits end up in the next generation. The individual is not the focus, the population is. And that’s hard for many people to accept, because their entire perception is centered on self and the individual.”FreeThoughtBlog.

Have we almost reached the point where the same can be said for OSS workflows? In the past (and the present?) we had pre-defined process flows. There may be an occasional if/else decision gate, but we could capture most variants on a process diagram. These pre-defined processes were / are akin to a production line.

Process diagrams are becoming harder to lock down as our decision trees get more complicated. Technologies proliferate, legacy product lines don’t get obsoleted, the number of customer contact channels increases. Not only that, but we’re now marketing to a segment of one, treating every one of our customers as unique, whilst trying not to break our OSS / BSS.

Do we have the technology yet that allows each transaction / workflow instance to just be treated as an experimental combination of attributes / tasks? More importantly, do we have the ability to identify any successful mutations that allow the population (ie the combination of all transactions) to get progressively better, faster, stronger.

It seems that to get to CX nirvana, being able to treat every customer completely uniquely, we need to first master an understanding of the population at scale. Conversely, to achieve the benefits of scale, we need to understand and learn from every customer interaction uniquely.

That’s evolution. The benchmark sets the pattern for future workflows until a variant / mutation identifies a better benchmark to establish the new pattern for future workflows, which continues.

The production line workflow model of the past won’t get us there. We need an evolution workflow model that is designed to accommodate infinite optionality and continually learn from it.

Does such a workflow tool exist yet? Actually, it’s more than a workflow tool. It’s a continually improving loop workflow.

The x-axis shows the functionality / use-cases. The y-axis shows the number of uses (it could equally represent usefulness or value).

Each big-impact demand (ie individual bars on the left-side of the graph) warrants separate investigation. The bars on the right side (ie the long tail in the red box) don’t. They might be worth investigating if we could treat some/all as a cohort though.

The left side of the graph represent the functionality / use-cases that have been around for decades. Every OSS has them. They’re so common and non-differentiated that they’re not remotely sexy. Customers / stakeholders aren’t going to be wowed by them. They’re just going to expect them. Our product developers have already delivered that functionality, have moved on and are now looking for new things to work on.

And where does the new stuff reside? Generally as new bars on the right side of the graph. That’s the law of diminishing returns territory right there! You’re unlikely to move the needle from out there.

Does this graph convince you to send your most skilled craftsmen back to do more tinkering / disrupting at the left side of the graph… as opposed to adding new features at the right side? Does it inspire you to dream up exciting cohort management techniques for the red box? Perhaps it even persuades you to cull some of the long-tail features that are chewing up lifecycle effort (eg code management, regression testing, complexity tax)?

If it does convince you, don’t forget to think about how you’re going to market it. How are you going to make the left side sexy / differentiated again? Are you going to have to prove just how much easier, cheaper, faster, more efficient, more profitable, etc it is? That brings us back to the OSS proof-of-worth discussion we had yesterday. It also brings us back to Sutton’s Law – go to where the money is.

Earlier this week we posted an article describing Sutton’s Law of OSS, which effectively tells us to go where the money is. The article suggested that in OSS we instead tend towards the exact opposite – the inverse-Sutton – we go to where the money isn’t. Instead of robbing banks like Willie Sutton, we break into a cemetery and aimlessly look for the cash register.

A good friend responded with the following, “Re: The money trail in OSS … I have yet to meet a senior exec. / decision maker in any telco who believes that any OSS component / solution / process … could provide benefit or return on any investment made. In telco, OSS = cost. I’ve tried very hard and worked with many other clever people also trying hard to find a way to pitch OSS which overcomes this preconception. BSS is often a little easier … in many cases it’s clear that “real money” flows through BSS and needs to be well cared for.”

He has a strong argument. The cost-out mentality is definitely ingrained in our industry.

We are saddled with the burden of proof. We need to prove, often to multiple layers of stakeholders, the true value of the (often intangible) benefits that our OSS deliver.

The same friend also posited, “The consequence is the necessity to establish beneficial working relationships with all key stakeholders – those who specify needs, those who design and implement solutions and those, especially, who hold or control the purse strings. [To an outsider] It’s never immediately obvious who these people are, nor what are their key drivers. Sometimes it’s ambition to climb the ladder, sometimes political need to “wedge” peers to build empires, sometimes it’s necessity to please external stakeholders – sometimes these stakeholders are vendors or government / international agencies. It’s complex and requires true consultancy – technical, business, political … at all levels – to determine needs and steer interactions.”

Again, so true. It takes more than just technical arguments.

I’m big on feedback loops, but also surprised at how little they’re used in telco – at all levels.

We spend inordinate amounts of time building and justifying business cases, but relatively little measuring the actual benefits produced after we’ve finished our projects (or gaining the learnings to improve the next round of business cases)

We collect data in our databases, obliviously let it age, realise at some point in the future that we have a data quality issue and perform remedial actions (eg audits, fixes, etc) instead of designing closed-loop improvement cycles that ensure DQ isn’t constantly deteriorating

We’re great at spending huge effort in gathering / arguing / prioritising requirements, but don’t always run requirements traceability all the way into testing and operational rollout.

etc

Which leads us back to the burden of proof. Our OSS have all the data in the world, but how often do we use it to justify and persuade – to prove?

Our OSS products have so many modules and technical functionality (so much of it effectively duplicated from vendor to vendor). But I’ve yet to see any vendor product that allows their customer, the OSS operators, to automatically gather proof-of-worth stats (ie executive-ready reports). Nor have I seen any integrator build proof-of-worth consultancy into their offer, whereby they work closely with their customer to define and collect the metrics that matter. BTW. If this sounds hard, I’d be happy to discuss how I approach this task.

So let me leave you with three important questions today:

Have you also experienced the overwhelming burden of the “OSS = cost” mentality

If so, do you have any suggestions / experiences on how you’ve overcome it

Does the proof-of-worth product functionality sound like it could be useful (noting that it doesn’t even have to be a product feature, but a custom report / portal using data that’s constantly coursing through our OSS databases)

Willie Sutton was an accomplished bank robber, particularly during the 1920s and 1930. Named after Willie, Sutton’s Law effectively states, “I go to where the money is,” which was supposedly Sutton’s response to a reporter’s question asking why he robbed banks instead of easier targets.

Interestingly for the OSS industry, we seem to follow the inverse of Sutton’s Law. We go to where the money isn’t. In other words, we mostly attempt to build business cases around the “cost-out” model, helping our customers achieve cost savings. These savings are in the form of automations that lead to reductions in head-count, cost of doing business, etc. Think about the common buzz-words – AI, machine learning, virtualisation, etc. Are they Sutton, or inverse-Sutton?

Truth be told, we do still go to where the money is because our customers (the network operators) are willing to spend money to save even more money. But you can see where I’m coming from can’t you?

Let me pose a question for you? Who is more likely to be comfortable spending money, someone who is confident in making money from the investment or someone who is going to save money from an investment?

I’d back Sutton’s Law and respond with the former. But we don’t tend to follow Sutton’s Law very often. It can often be challenging because so many of the benefits of our OSS and BSS are intangible. We’re seen as cost centres because we don’t do a good enough job of showing how important we are at operationalising everything that happens in a service provider’s network (and business).

At TM Forum’s DTA event a couple of weeks ago, I was pleased to see that some of the big telco API initiatives (eg Telkomsel, Telstra’s Network as a Service [NaaS] and China Mobile’s Data Security and Privacy Management Framework) are starting to make a real impact. The API model represents our strongest industry-wide push towards revenue-based business cases in years (that I can remember anyway).

The API model is an interesting one though. As well as revenue-in, it also potentially represents a cost out model (ie reduced cost of sales), a platform play (ie leveraging the network effect by allowing partners to build their own revenues on top), but on the downside also potentially triggers revenue cannibalisation.

Personally, I’m considering Sutton’s Law more in terms of our customers’ customers (ie end users of communication services, like the gamers in the Monty Hong link) rather than customers (ie the comms service providers that want to reduce costs).

I’d love to hear about your perception of Sutton’s Law in OSS. Where do you think the money is?

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We’ve all heard the Kodak story. They invented digital cameras but stuck them in a drawer because it was going to cannibalise their dominant position in the photographic film revenue stream… eventually leading to bankruptcy.

Swisscom invented an equivalent of WhatsApp years before WhatsApp came onto the market. It allowed users (only Swisscom users, not external / global customers BTW) to communicate via a single app – calls, chat, pictures, videos, etc. Swisscom parked it because it was going to cannibalise their voice and SMS revenue streams. That product, iO, is now discontinued. Meanwhile, WhatsApp achieved an exit of nearly $22B by selling to Facebook.

Some network operators are baulking at offering SD-WAN as it may cannibalise their MPLS service offerings. It will be interesting to see how this story plays out.

What also intrigues me is where cannibalisation is going to come for the OSS industry. What is the format of network operationalisation that’s simpler, more desirable to customers, probably cheaper, but completely destroys current revenue models? Do any of the vendors already have such capability but have parked it in a drawer because of revenue destruction?

History seems to have proven that it’s better to cannibalise your own revenues than allow your competitors to do so.

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Yesterday’s post described the ways in which Telkomsel has strategically changed their value-chain to attract revenues with greater premiums than the traditional model of a telco. They’ve used a new digital core and an API framework to help facilitate their business model transformation. As promised yesterday, we’ll take a slightly closer look at the culture of Telkomsel’s transformation today.

Monty Hong of Telkomsel presented the following slides during a presentation at TM Forum’s DTA (Digital Transformation Asia) last week.

The diagram below shows a graph showing the need for patience and ongoing commitment to major structural transformations like the one Telkomsel underwent.

The curve above tends to represent the momentum and morale I’ve felt on most large OSS projects. Unfortunately, I’ve also been involved in projects where project sponsors haven’t stayed the journey beyond the dip (Q4/5 in the graph above) and haven’t experienced the benefits of the proposed project. This graph articulates the message well that change management and stakeholder / sponsor champions are an important, but often overlooked component of an OSS transformation.

The diagram below helps to articulate the benefits of an open API model being made accessible to external market-places. We’re entering an exciting time for OSS, with previously hidden, back-end telco functionality now being increasingly presented to the market (if even only as APIs into the black-box).

Amongst many other benefits, it helps to bring the customer closer to implementers of these back-end systems.

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Don’t worry. The title of this post isn’t a typo, but I’ll get to that shortly.

I’ve just had an interesting day 2 at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation Asia (https://dta.tmforum.org and #tmfdigitalasia ). The quality of presentations was again quite high with further thought-provoking ideas!!

My favorite session for the day was a panel discussion entitled, “Is open-source the future of OSS/BSS?” Hence the title of today’s blog. Is OSS (open source software) the future of OSS?

Trevor Cheung of OpenROADS Community spoke about their framework for delivering transformation. One point he emphasised was that we’re so wrapped up in Customer Experience (CX), we often forget about Employee Experience. Put simply, if we don’t win the hearts and minds of the implementers, there’s never going to be a transformed experience for the customers to have.

Jurgen Hase of unlimit gave a number of really interesting perspectives, but the best is paraphrased as follows, “The S in IoT stands for security… Wait, what? There is no S in IoT??”

Next was Angelia Ooi of TIME. Angelia provided 8 really useful tips on digital transformation via a presentation pack that is easily the most succinct and polished of all those I’ve seen at DTA so far.

Joddy Hernady of Telkom Indonesia provided some of the economics of becoming a digital telco, which provided an interesting perspective on the benefits of achieving digital transformation.

But finally, and it was the last presentation of the day that was most thought-provoking. Is open source the future of OSS/BSS?
Unfortunately I missed almost all of Catherine Michel’s opening gambit, but I believe the CTO of Sigma Systems made the key point that open source projects such as Mongo DB should really only be considered once they’d reached a level of maturity, ongoing development and support that approaches the large ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) such as Sigma Systems. She also highlighted the multi-layered challenges around licensing / rights.
Gnanapriya Chidambaranathan of Infosys contended that there is a wealth of open source projects that can be leveraged, curated and supported by integrators such as Infosys. She posed that open source adoption is a key to innovation.
Venura Mendis of Apigate provided the perspective of an open source software provider. He highlighted the challenge he faces in dealing with traditional carrier procurement teams, particularly in their ambition of reaching comparative TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) models.
Guy Lupo of Telstra provided a number of different and interesting perspectives, as he regularly does, this time on a carrier deciding between ISV, open source products and going down the path (rabbit hole?) of open sourcing their own developments. Guy’s perspectives were really pertinent as he’s currently utilising all of these options in his NaaS (Network as a Service) program at Telstra.

Finally, a few thoughts from me on the topic of OSS as the future of OSS.

1. One of the biggest challenges facing the future of OSS is fragmentation. The PAOSS vendor list has over 200 records (and I’ll be doing a major update again shortly that will add hundreds of additional vendors). This means the available skills pool is diluted with a lot of functionality duplication. It also means it becomes really challenging for customers to choose the right product for their needs (although we could claim that this is a good thing for PAOSS as we often assist customers with this challenge). The proliferation of open source projects that deliver OSS/BSS functionality further fragments and dilutes

2. We’re seeing a trend away from the behemoth software stacks of the past for a variety of reasons, but could be summed up as the laws of physics preventing us from making a large-scale OSS pivots. The more modular OSS appear to be more nimble. This plays into the hands of niche open source offerings. It appears contra to the massive-scale open source efforts of ONAP, which interestingly, the above mentioned panelists also held doubts over ONAP’s ability to succeed. I should note that they, like me, were also enthusiastic about facets of ONAP such as the collaboration, initiative taken, etc.

3. I still believe there is the potential to build an open-source OSS core that then allows collaboration and plug-ins to be developed, thus better leveraging the long tail of innovation from the available skills pool. Today’s panelists did throw something of a spanner in these works though by pointing out the layered licensing challenge with open source. It’s quite common for open source projects to leverage open source projects, which in turn leverage open source projects. Guy in particular highlighted just how big a problem it has been for Telstra’s procurement team to trace out all the open source threads.

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I’ve just had a really interesting first day at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation Asia (https://dta.tmforum.org and #tmfdigitalasia ). The quality of presentations was quite high. Some great thought-provoking ideas!!

Nik Willetts kicked off his keynote with the following quote, which I’m paraphrasing, “Telcos need to start capturing value, not just creating it as they have for the last decade.”

For me, this is THE key takeaway for this event, above any of the other interesting technical discussions from day 1 (and undoubtedly on the agenda for the next 2 days too).

The telecommunications industry has made a massive contribution to the digital lifestyle that we now enjoy. It has been instrumental in adding enormous value to our lives and our economy. But all the while, telecommunications providers globally have been experiencing diminishing profitability and share-of-wallet (as described in this earlier post). Clearly the industry has created enormous value, but hasn’t captured as much as it would’ve liked.

The question to ask is how will our thinking and our OSS/BSS stacks help to contribute to capturing more value for our customers. As described in the share of wallet post above, the premium end of the value chain has always been in the content (think in terms of phone conversations in days gone by, or the myriad of comms techniques today such as email, live chat, blogs, etc, etc). That’s what the customer pays for – the experience – not the networks or systems that facilitate it.

The Internet has allowed enormous proliferation of the premium-end of the telecommunications value chain. It’s too late to stuff that genie back into the bottle. But to Nik’s further comment, we can help customers achieve their goals by becoming their “do-it-yourself” digital partners.

“Data mass is beginning to exhibit gravitational properties – it’s getting heavy – and eventually it will be too big to move.”
Guy Lupo in this article on TM Forum’s Inform that also includes contributions from George Glass and Dawn Bushaus.

In my earlier days in OSS, I was tasked with leading the migration of large sets of data into relational databases for use by OSS tools. I was lucky enough to spend years working on a full-scope OSS (ie it’s central database housed data for inventory management, alarm management, performance management, service order management, provisioning, etc, etc).

Having all those data sets in one database made it incredibly powerful as an insight generation tool. With a few SQL joins, you could correlate almost any data sets imaginable. But it was also a double-edged sword. Firstly, ensuring that all of the sets would have linking keys (and with high data quality / reliability) was a data migrator’s nightmare. Secondly, all those joins being done by the OSS made it computationally heavy. It wasn’t uncommon for a device list query to take the OSS 10 minutes to provide a response in the PROD environment.

There’s one concept that makes GIS tools more inherently capable of lifting heavier data sets than OSS – they generally load data in layers (that can be turned on and off in the visual pane) and unlike OSS, don’t attempt to stitch the different sets together. The correlation between data sets is achieved through geographical proximity scans, either algorithmically, or just by the human eye of the operator.

If we now consider real-time data (eg alarms/events, performance counters, etc), we can take a leaf out of Einstein’s book and correlate by space and time (ie by geographical and/or time-series proximity between otherwise unrelated data sets). Just wondering – How many OSS tools have you seen that use these proximity techniques? Very few in my experience.

BTW. I’m the first to acknowledge that a stitched data set (ie via linking keys such as device ID between data sets) is definitely going to be richer than uncorrelated data sets. Nonetheless, this might be a useful technique if your data is getting too heavy for your OSS to lift (eg simple queries are causing minutes of downtime / delay for operators).

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I wonder if we’re reaching the point where “telecommunication services” is no longer a relevant term? By association, SLAs are also a bust. But what are they replaced by?

A telecommunication service used to effectively be the allocation of a carrier’s resources for use by a specific customer. Now? Well, less so

Service consumption channel alternatives are increasing, from TV and radio; to PC, to mobile, to tablet, to YouTube, to Insta, to Facebook, to a million others.
Consumption sources are even more prolific.

Customer contact channel alternatives are also increasing, from contact centres; to IVR, to online, to mobile apps, to Twitter, etc.

A service bundle often utilises third-party components, some of which are “off-net”

Virtualisation is increasingly abstracting services from specific resources. They’re now loosely coupled with resource pools and rely on high availability / elasticity to ensure customer service continuity. Not only that, but those resource pools might extend beyond the carrier’s direct control and out to cloud provider infrastructure

The growing variant-tree is taking the concept beyond the reach of “customer services” and evolves to become “customer experiences.”

The elements that made up a customer service in the past tended to fall within the locus of control of a telco and its OSS. The modern customer experience extends far beyond the control of any one company or its OSS. An SLA – Service Level Agreement – only pertains to the sub-set of an experience that can be measured by the OSS. We can aspire to offer an ELA – Experience Level Agreement – because we don’t have the mechanisms by which to measure or manage the entire experience yet.

The metrics that matter most for telcos today tend to revolve around customer experience (eg NPS). But aside from customer surveys, ratings and derived / contrived metrics, we don’t have electronic customer experience measurements.

Customer services are dead; Long live the customer experiences king… if only we can invent a way to measure the whole scope of what makes up customer experiences.

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The left-hand panel of the triptych below shows the current state of interactions with most OSS. There are hundreds of variants inbound via external sources (ie multi-channel) and even internal sources (eg different service types). Similarly, there are dozens of networks (and downstream systems), each with different interface models. Each needs different formatting and integration costs escalate.

The intent model of network provisioning standardises the network interface, drastically simplifying the task of the OSS and the variants required for it to handle. This becomes particularly relevant in a world of NFVs, where it doesn’t matter which vendor’s device type (router say) can be handled via a single command intent rather than having separate interfaces to each different vendor’s device / EMS northbound interface. The unique aspects of each vendor’s implementation are abstracted from the OSS.

The next step would be in standardising the interface / data model upstream of the OSS. That’s a more challenging task!!

We all know of the tectonic shifts in the world of telco services, profitability and business models.

One common trend is for telcos to offer pipes that are bigger and faster. Seems like a commoditising business model to me, but our OSS still need to support that. How? Through enabling efficiency at scale. Building tools, GUIs, workflows, integrations, sales pipelines, etc that enable telcos march seamlessly towards offering ever bigger/faster pipes. An OSS/BSS stack that supports this could represent one of the few remaining sustainable competitive advantages, so any such OSS/BSS could be highly valuable to its owner.

But if the bigger/faster pipe model is commoditising and there’s little differentiation between competing telcos’ OSS/BSS on service activation, then what is the alternative? Services that are better? But what is “better”? More to the point, what is sustainably better (ie can’t be easily copied by competitors)? Services that are “better” are likely to come in many different forms, but they’re unlikely to be related to the pipe (except maybe reliability / SLA / QoS). They’re more likely to be in the “bundling,” which may include premium content, apps, customer support, third-party products, etc. An OSS/BSS that is highly flexible in supporting any mix of bundling becomes important. Product / service catalogs are one of many possible examples.

An even bigger differentiator is not bigger / faster / better, but different (if perceived by the market as being invaluably different). The challenge with being different is that “different” tends to be fleeting. It tends to only last for a short period of time before competitors catch up. Since many of the differences available to telco services are defined in software, the window of opportunity is getting increasingly short… except when it comes to the OSS/BSS being able to operationalise that differentiator. It’s not uncommon for a new feature to take 9+ months to get to market, with changes to the OSS/BSS taking up a significant chunk of the project’s critical path. Having an OSS/BSS stack that can repeatedly get a product / feature to market much faster than competing telcos provides greater opportunity to capture the market during the window of difference.

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“This is the logic that led Facebook inexorably to the ‘algorithmic feed’, which is really just tech jargon for saying that instead of this random (i.e. ‘time-based’) sample of what’s been posted, the platform tries to work out which people you would most like to see things from, and what kinds of things you would most like to see. It ought to be able to work out who your close friends are, and what kinds of things you normally click on, surely? The logic seems (or at any rate seemed) unavoidable. So, instead of a purely random sample, you get a sample based on what you might actually want to see. Unavoidable as it seems, though, this approach has two problems. First, getting that sample ‘right’ is very hard, and beset by all sorts of conceptual challenges. But second, even if it’s a successful sample, it’s still a sample… Facebook has to make subjective judgements about what it seems that people want, and about what metrics seem to capture that, and none of this is static or even in in principle perfectible. Facebook surfs user behaviour..”
Ben Evanshere.

Most of the OSS I’ve seen tend to be akin to Facebook’s old ‘chronological feed’ (where users need to sift through thousands of posts to find what’s most interesting to them).

The typical OSS GUI has thousands of functions (usually displayed on a screen all at once – via charts, menus, buttons, pull-downs, etc). But of all of those available functions, any given user probably only interacts with a handful.

Most OSS give their users the opportunity to customise their menus, colour schemes, even filters. For some roles such as network ops, designers, order entry operators, there are activity lists, often with sophisticated prioritisation and skills-based routing, which starts to become a little more like the ‘algorithmic feed.’

However, unlike the random nature of information hitting the Facebook feed, there is a more explicit set of things that an OSS user is tasked to achieve. It is a little more directed, like a Google search.

That’s why I feel the future OSS GUI will be more like a simple search bar (like Google) that will provide a direction of intent as well as some recent / regular activity icons. Far less clutter than the typical OSS. The graphs and activity lists that we know and love would still be available to users, but the way of interacting with the OSS to find the most important stuff quickly needs to get more intuitive. In future it may even get predictive in knowing what information will be of interest to you.

A number of years ago I heard about an OSS product that introduced collaborative rooms for network operators to collectively solve challenging network health events. It was in line with some of my own thinking about the use of collaboration techniques to solve cross-domain or complex events. But the concept hasn’t caught on in the way that I expected. I was curious why, so I asked around some friends and colleagues who are hands-on managing networks every day.

The answer showed that I hadn’t got close enough to understanding the psyche at the coal-face. It seems that operators have a preference for the current approach, the tick and flick of trouble tickets until the solution forms and the problem is solved.

This shows the psyche of collaboration at a micro scale. I wonder if it holds true at a macro scale too?

No CSP has an everywhere footprint (admittedly cloud providers are close to everywhere though, in part through global presence, in part through coverage of the access domain via their own networks and/or OTT connectivity). For customers that need to cross geo-footprints, carriers take a tick and flick approach in terms of OSS. The OSS of one carrier passes orders to the other carrier’s OSS. Each OSS stays within the bounds of its organisation’s locus of control (see this blog for further context).

To me, there seems to be an opportunity for carriers to get out of their silo. To leverage collaboration for speed, coverage, etc by designing offerings in OSS design rooms rather than standards workshops. A global product catalog sandpit as it were for carriers to design offerings in. Every carrier’s service offering / API / contract resides there for other carriers to interact with.

But once again, I may not be close enough to understanding the psyche at the coal-face. If you work at this coal-face, I’d love to get your opinions on why this would or would not work.

Like this:

“While the 20th century was all about centralizing command and control to gain efficiency through vertical integration and mass standardization, 21st century automation is about decentralization – gaining efficiency through horizontal integration of partner ecosystems and mass customization, as in the context-aware cloud where personalized experience across channels is dynamically orchestrated.
The operational challenge of our time is to coordinate these moving parts into coherent and manageable value chains. Instead of building yet another siloed and brittle application stack, the age of distributed computing requires that we re-think business architecture to avoid becoming hopelessly entangled in a “big ball of CRUD”.”
Dave Duggal here on TM Forum’s Inform back in May 2016.

We’ve quickly transitioned from a telco services market driven by economies of scale (Dave’s 20th century comparison) to a “market of one” (21st century), where the market wants a personalised experience that seamlessly crosses all channels.

By and large, the OSS world is stuck between the two centuries. Our tools are largely suited to the 20th century model (in some cases, today’s OSS originated in the 20th century after all), but we know we need to get to personalisation at scale and have tried to retrofit them. We haven’t quite made the jump to the model Dave describes yet, although there are positive signs.

It’s interesting. Telcos have the partner ecosystems, but the challenge is that the entire ecosystem still tends to be centrally controlled by the telco. This is the so-called best-of-breed model.

In the truly distributed model Dave talks about, the telcos would get the long tail of innovation / opportunity by extending their value chain beyond their own OSS stack. They could build an ecosystem that includes partners outside their locus of control. Outside their CAPEX budget too, which is the big attraction. They telcos get to own their customers, build products that are attractive to those customers, gain revenues from those products / customers, but not incur the big capital investment of building the entire OSS stack. Their partners build (and share profits from) external components.

It sounds attractive right? As-a-service models are proliferating and some are steadily gaining take-up, but why is it still not happening much yet, relatively speaking? I believe it comes down to control.

Put simply, the telcos don’t yet have the right business architectures to coordinate all the moving parts. From my customer observation at least, there are too many fall-outs as a customer journeys hand off between components within the internally controlled partner ecosystem. This is especially when we talk omni-channel. A fully personalised solution leaves too many integration / data variants to provide complete test coverage. For example, just at the highest level of an architecture, I’ve yet to see a solution that tracks end-to-end customer journeys across all components of the OSS/BSS as well as channels such as online, IVR, apps, etc.

Dave rightly points out that this is the challenge of our times. If we can coherently and confidently manage moving parts across the entire value chain, we have more chance of extending the partner ecosystem beyond the telco’s locus of control.